non places and the spaces of art

IntroductionThis is a paper about cultural form. More speci�-

cally, it is a paper about the transformation of a

particular Western cultural form, art (in its modern,

generic, post-Romantic, institutionalised sense as‘autonomous’), under the conditions of an emer-

gent global capitalist modernity. It moves in four

parts from 1) a clari�cation of the notion of ‘global

capitalist modernity’, via 2) discussion of the signif-

icance of space to the understanding of art as cultural form, to 3) a critical exposition of the con-

cept of ‘non-place’, as the spatial correlate of the

temporal form of the modern, and 4) a characteri-

sation of ‘art-space’ as a distinctive – indeed, exem-

plary – type of non-place, current transformationsof which need to be understood in terms of devel-

opments in the spatial logic of modernity itself.1

1. A global capitalist modernity?For all its ubiquity and apparent simplicity, ‘moder-

nity’ remains at times a confusing term. It is under-stood here to refer to a culture of temporal

abstraction centred on that restless logic of nega-

tion that makes up the temporal dialectic of the

new. As such, it de�nes a distinctive structure of

historical experience. Nonetheless, the unity of thisstructure notwithstanding, its concrete meanings

are open to signi�cant historical variation, relative

to the speci�c terms and boundaries of the various

�elds of experience that are subjected to its

temporal logic, and to the speci�c modes of nega-

tion that are employed. Such negations give

determinate content to ‘the modern’ in any partic-

ular instance, in each speci�c time and place. ‘Themodern’, in other words, is primarily a schema, in

Kant’s sense: a ‘rule of pure synthesis’ or ‘tran-

scendental determination of time’ that mediates

the pure givenness of appearances with categorial

or intelligible forms. It is only secondarily or deriv-atively a mode of historical periodisation (with

various beginnings, but no end) and a cultural-

historical project. ‘Modernity’ is the name for an

actually existing, or socially realised, temporal

formalism that is constitutive of certain formationsof subjectivity. It is in this sense that it is a distinc-

tively ‘cultural’ category: the fundamental form of

time-consciousness in capitalist societies.2

Within the terms of this analysis, art is modern

to the extent to which it is dependent for its intelligibility upon the temporal logic of negation

characteristic of the dialectic of ‘the new’, in a qual-

itatively historical (rather than a merely fashion-

based) sense of the term. That is, it is modern to

the extent to which it makes its claim on thepresent, through its negation of past forms, in the

name of a particular, qualitatively different future.

Furthermore, as the art of a present which is itself

modern (in the sense of understanding itself within

the terms of the dialectic of the new), modern artis inherently engaged with the issue of abstraction

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The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 6Summer 2001

Non-places and the spaces of art

Peter Osborne Centre for Research in Modern European

Philosophy, Middlesex University,

London N17 8HR, UK

© 2001 The Journal of Architecture 1360–2365 / DOI: 10.1080/13602360110048203

at the level of its social content, as well as those ofboth its own historical logic and, more concretely,

its relation to �guration – this more immediate

sense in which art is conceived as being ‘abstract’

being but a particular artistic means for the expres-

sion of the other two. Indeed one might say, fromthis point of view, that art is the privileged social

site – or at the least, the catalytic trigger – for the

experience of abstraction, in and for itself, as an

historical form. Modern art extracts abstraction

from its various social sites and re�ects upon it asform. Hence the danger, but by no means the

necessity, of aestheticisation, which involves a

forgetting of the social bases of abstraction as a

form of experience.

Such are the presuppositions about modernityand art that govern what follows. However, if the

modern is a temporal concept, it nonetheless has

certain spatial – speci�cally, certain geo-political –

conditions of existence. These conditions are

currently undergoing radical transformation in theprocess of the globalisation of capitalism as an

economic and cultural form. It is for this reason, in

my view, that the global capitalist modernity that

is currently emerging must be considered a distinc-

tively new historical form of modernity itself. Forthe fundamental change in its spatial conditions

alters the distribution and dynamics of its temporal

form. This is not ‘late’ modernity (it shows no signs

of ending), let alone ‘postmodernity’ (an idea that

appears more preposterous by the day), but, moresimply, another, more generalised form of moder-

nity itself: supermodernity, perhaps, in the light of

the intensi�cation of its temporal immanence,

although personally I do not favour the term.

This process may be summed up in three theses:

1. We live in an emergent global modernity.

2. At the same time, there are many modernities;

but the logic of multiplicity of these moderni-

ties is different – has a different conceptualshape – from the multiplicity of previous

forms.

3. Global modernity is not, fundamentally, geo-

politically, about the hegemony of the West,

but about the hegemony of capital.

Let me explain these, very brie�y, in turn.

1. We live in a global modernity. This is to

say, the globalisation of certain socio-economic

processes currently constitutive of modernity as aform of historical experience (overwhelmingly but

not exclusively, capitalist relations of production and

exchange) means that, for the �rst time historically,

as a result of the collapse of the Soviet system (the

dream of a socialist modernity), and at a certainlevel of abstraction and possible experience, moder-

nity is everywhere. Modernity has become spatially

one. There is a single spatial ground to the de�ni-

tion of the historical present. In particular, within

the current form of capitalist globalisation, the twomain geo-political conditions of the previous form

of modernity (colonialism and the Cold War) are no

longer the primary spatial basis for the temporal

differentiation of the new. The temporal differen-

tial of the modern is no longer primarily derivedfrom historically �xed or enduring socially coded

spatial differences; it is immanent to a single plan-

etary space of which all places are a part, albeit in

radically uneven ways. This temporal differential is

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Non-places and the spaces

of artPeter Osborne

distributed across global social space in new, morecomplex and often rapidly changing ways.

2. At the same time, there are many moderni-

ties: distinct forms of experience of the modern.

However, these are either socio-spatially speci�c

forms of experience of (the one) global modernity(socio-spatially embedded perspectives on its glob-

ality, if you like), or the result of social processes

and practices at lower levels of spatial organisation:

within regions, for example, or within historically

received patterns of inter-national domination. The‘modern’ temporal coding of such historically

received relations of domination (colonialism, impe-

rialism, Cold War) subsists within global modernity,

but it conditions, rather than in itself determining,

the distribution of temporal differentiations at aglobal level. This multiplicity of modernities has a

new conceptual shape, to which the idea of ‘alter-

native’ modernities is inadequate. For as Harry

Harootunian has argued, the notion of alternative

modernities tends to reinscribe the historicallyreceived geo-political particularisms of the moder-

nity/tradition binary of colonial difference, within its

generalisation (through simple quantitative multi-

plication) of the �rst term.3 The multiplication of

modernities within global modernity has, rather, amore complex, distributional logic.

3. Global modernity is not, fundamentally, about

the hegemony of the West, so much as about the

hegemony of capital. Capital is not in itself tied to

any territorial principle (this is the distinctive modeof abstraction of the value form), although different

regimes of accumulation may have particular geo-

political conditions of existence at particular histor-

ical times. ‘The West’ has been the geo-political

carrier of the principle of capitalism, historically, but capitalism is increasingly generalised, residing

immanently in the global economic system,

following a territorial logic that may enter into

con�ict with the geo-political interests of its primary

‘hosts’. Global modernity (one, internally differen-tial, historical present) is as much, if not more,

about the historical effects of the relations between

different forms of capital, as about the relations

between capitalist and non-capitalist social forms.

Different forms of capital refunction (appropriateand transform but also preserve) a variety of non-

capitalist social forms, producing historically

ambiguous identities and contradictory experiences

of abstraction.4

This emergent global capitalist modernity has two additional spatial features to which I would like

to draw attention: 1) an intensi�cation of the

primacy of temporal over spatial relations to the

point of the immanent negation of place as a spa-

tial variable – which is not the same thing as thenegation of space, since ‘space’ is not reducible

to ‘place’; 2) a focusing or concentration of this

process on changes in the spatial determinations of

metropolitan centres, giving rise to what Saskia

Sassen has called ‘global cities’ or, more broadly,what Manuel Castells describes as ‘informational

cities’.5 These changes derive from changes in the

spatial logic of economic and communicational rela-

tions and have de�nite implications for the devel-

opment, or fundamental determinations, of art asa cultural form; implications with direct relevance to

ongoing debates about the autonomy of art, insti-

tutionalisation, and avant-gardes. It is thus through

this spatial lens that I shall approach these debates.

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2. Art and spaceThis is hardly a new move. It was fashionable in the

1980s and early 1990s to distinguish postmodernistfrom modernist theory by a turn (or return) to space

and spatial relations, against the supposedly one-

sided obsession with time and history constitutive

of the problematic of modernity. That any such

move from ‘time’ to ‘space’ is simple-minded (likethe af�rmative conception of postmodernism

itself, or indeed, the idea of a temporal problem-

atic without spatial presuppositions and implica-

tions) hardly needs restating today. When we speak

independently of ‘time’ and ‘space’ we always dealonly with aspects of integral sets of time-space rela-

tions. Nonetheless, the spatial conditions of various

temporal relations were undoubtedly neglected,

theoretically, in earlier debates about modernity, in

part because of the relative historical stability duringthat period of their implicitly assumed basic form:

the territoriality of the nation-state. The new focus

on space within Anglophone theory during the

1980s and 1990s, at the intersection of disciplinary

transformations in geography, urban sociology,political economy, anthropology, architecture, and

cultural theory, recti�ed this neglect, to a great

extent, �rst at the level of the local (especially, the

urban), second at the level of regions (both within

and beyond nation states), and more recently, atthe global level. However, in the main, this litera-

ture has remained isolated from the (post-post-

modernism) renewal and complication of debates

about modernity, in large part because of its devel-

opment within the self-enclosed and increasinglyimplausible problematic of postmodernism. It has,

though, connected up with both post-minimalist

debates in art theory (especially around the notionof public art)6 and critical writing about the archi-

tectural schemes of various post-conceptual artists

(such as Dan Graham) and the gradual ‘architec-

turalisation of art’ with which such art may be asso-

ciated.7

This is a tendency that goes far beyond the

increased importance of architectural design to

museum development and display, and the insistent

presence of architectural projects in art spaces

(plans, models, diagrams, computer-simulatedbuildings, etc), to include gallery-alteration and

building-modi�cation as not merely institutionally

recognised, but increasingly dominant, art forms.8

Minimalism effaced the boundary between painting

and sculpture, drawing attention to the art object’srelations to its institutional space; post-minimalist

art often moved outside the physical locality of the

gallery altogether. This new type of work situates

itself at the boundaries between architectural space

and its environment at a time when the distinctionbetween architecture and infrastructure is itself

being challenged by newly integrated forms

of urban planning, made possible by new design

technologies and building processes and materials.9

It points back to the prescient signi�cance of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, although it

tends to de-politicise and aestheticise his legacy. It

points forward to a new stage in the development

of the post-conceptual art culture of installation or

spatial instantiation. (Installation, on my under-standing, is the spatial instantiation of art ideas.)

These are developments to which the still power-

ful Situationist problematic of commodi�cation

and technological mediation (‘spectacle’) remains

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of artPeter Osborne

relevant, but to which it increasingly appears, incrucial respects, inadequate. They also mark a

certain historical redundancy in existing forms of

the artistic project of institutional critique, insofar

as they presuppose the art museum and gallery as

the prevailing physical sites of contemporary art. Ishall take a conceptual approach to these develop-

ments, starting at the highest level of abstraction:

the negation of place.

3. Non-placeThe idea of non-places derives from the French

historian Michel de Certeau’s Invention of the

Everyday. Volume One (1974), but it is from the

short but powerful text by the French anthropolo-

gist Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to anAnthropology of Supermodernity (1992), which in

certain respects inverts de Certeau’s use of the

term, that I shall take my cue. Augé’s book is

concerned to rede�ne the object of an anthropo-

logical study of ‘the contemporary world’. It introduces the idea of non-places as the spatial

dimension of a general conception of ‘super-

modernity’ as a culture of ‘excess’, de�ned by an

‘overabundance of events’, in which the very idea

of individuated culture, ‘localised in time andspace’, has become redundant. As the spatial

consequence of ‘changes of scale,. . . the prolifer-

ation of imaged and imaginary references, and . . .

the spectacular acceleration of means of transport’,

Augé’s idea of non-places embraces:the installations needed for the accelerated cir-

culation of passengers and goods (high-speed

roads and railways, interchanges, airports) . . .

just as much . . . as the means of transport

themselves . . . [the proliferating] transit pointsand temporary abodes . . . under luxurious or

inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats,

holiday clubs and refugee camps, shanty

towns threatened with demolition or doomed

to festering longevity) . . . the great commer-cial centres . . . where the habitué of super-

markets, slot machines and credit cards

communicates wordlessly, through gestures,

with an abstract, unmediated commerce . . .

and �nally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilise extraterrestria l

space for the purposes of a communication

so peculiar that it often puts the individual in

contact only with another image of him [or

her]self.’10

As its syntax suggests, ‘non-place’ is conceived

negatively, as ‘a space which cannot be de�ned as

relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.’

As such, it is a form of space characterised by

abstraction, in which its passing inhabitants locatethemselves �rst and foremost through relations

with words. This ‘invasion of space by text’, as Augé

puts it, is understood to produce a ‘solitary contrac-

tuality’ as the distinctive mode of social existence

of its (temporary) inhabitants. ‘Alone, but one ofmany, the user of a non-place is in contractual rela-

tions with it (or with powers that govern it) . . .

[and] is reminded, when necessary, that the

contract exists.’ Such ‘instructions for use’ may be

prescriptive, prohibitive or informative (‘Take right-hand lane’ and ‘You are now entering the

Beaujolais region’ are Augé’s distinctively French

examples); they may be in ordinary language or in

more, or less, explicitly codi�ed ideograms; and

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their proponents are not individuals but institutionsof various sorts, the presence of which is at times

explicitly stated (Metropolitan Transport Authority),

at others only vaguely discernible.11 Augé’s non-

places are thus the dialectical residue of the dual

negation of place by itineracy and textuality.However, productive as I hope this idea will be

shown to be, Augé’s presentation of the concept

of non-place is both theoretically ambiguous and

critically ambivalent. Theoretically, it equivocates

between an abstract and a dialectical conception ofnegation. Critically, it oscillates between a back-

ward-looking romanticisation of the anthropolog-

ical conception of place and a forward-looking

positive ‘ethnology of solitude’. This is the result of

the restrictions of the anthropological perspective.Thus, Augé writes:

The non-place . . . never exists in a pure form;

places reconstitute themselves in it; relations

are restored and resumed in it; the ‘millennial

ruses’ of ‘the invention of the everyday’ and‘the arts of doing’, so subtly analysed by

Michel de Certeau, can clear a path there and

deploy their strategies. Place and non-place are

rather like opposed polarities: the �rst is never

completely erased, the second never totallycompleted; they are like palimpsests on which

the scrambled game of identity and relations

is ceaselessly rewritten.12

This is in many ways a plausible – indeed convincing

– even poetic, scenario. However, if the non-place never exists in a ‘pure form’ (that is, as an

absolute negation or annihilation of place), this

is surely because it can only be coherently

construed, conceptually (and not just as an accident

of ‘existence’), as itself intrinsically a special type ofplace, constituted as a place by its dialectical nega-

tion of place in the anthropological sense of a space

that generates identity-forming meanings out of

the permanence and generational continuity of the

physical contiguity of its boundaries. That is, I wantto argue, all non-places are places qua non-places,

not only in addition or palimpsestically; since their

meaning derives from their determinate negation

of the relation between locale and meaning,

internal to the boundaries of physical contiguitywhich de�ne what Manual Castells calls the ‘space

of places’, which is the terrain of Augé’s analysis.

(In Castells’s words: ‘A place is a locale whose form,

function and meaning are self-contained within the

boundaries of physical contiguity.’)13 Hence Augé’svarious lists of ‘non-places’. Yet this form of dialec-

tical interiority to place tempers the radicalism of

the idea of non-place, reducing its challenge to the

spatial logic of places to the blocked passage of a

negative dialectic. Hence its critical ambivalence –only poetically resolved.

Despite his implicit account of the social basis

of non-places in the revolution in transport and

communications technologies in market societies,

and his understanding of their tendency to gener-alisation, as all places increasingly become places

through which people travel – for Augé, traveller ’s

space is the ‘archetype’ of non-place14 – Augé fails

to press the concept of non-place beyond its

abstractly negative determination, towards the ideaof a new spatial logic. He leaves the concept of

place in place. For Augé, the only positive content

of the concept of non-place resides in the idea

of solitary contractuality, an associated ‘emptying

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of artPeter Osborne

of individuality’,15 and its necessarily being ‘over-written’ by conventional relations of place by the

actors within it. In particular, the concept of place

fails to register within itself the spatial dimension

of the new forms of interdependence that exceed

the logic of place (whether by transport or commu-nication) and which render the notion of non-place

necessary. Such new forms of interdependence

exceed the anthropological sense of place, not by

virtue of their failure to generate a certain identity-

forming type of meaning, but by their negation ofthe purely spatial dimension of place as physical

contiguity. (The anthropological imagination fails to

conceive of the possibility of an identity-forming

generation of meaning outside the con�nes of

place – in the speci�c sense of a place de�ned by‘boundaries of physical contiguity’. In this respect,

the conceptual destruction of anthropology is a

condition for thinking the structure of experience

under the conditions of a global capitalist moder-

nity. Critical anthropology can never, in principle, becritical enough.) However, if one conceives Augé’s

non-places in the context of such networks of

relations, they appear less as ‘empty’ or ‘solitary’

versions of traditional places and more as radically

new ontological types of place, constituted quaplaces through their relations to another spatiality,

which Castells calls the ‘space of �ows’. This ‘space

of �ows’ is a purported new spatial logic grounded

in ‘the transformation of location patterns of core

economic activities under the new technologicalsystem . . . the rise of the electronic home and the

. . . evolution of urban forms.’ It governs ‘�ows of

capital, �ows of information, �ows of technology,

�ows of organisational interaction, �ows of images,

sounds and symbols’ – not exclusively, according toCastells, but nonetheless already ‘dominantly’.16

(This is an economic-technological version of the

globalisation thesis.) The international art world is

a space of �ows.

What Augé calls ‘non-places’, it would seem, aremore properly conceived as the product of the

dialectic of the space of places and the space of

�ows. In this sense – that is, critically reconceived

– the idea of non-place may be developed into

a genuinely ‘post-anthropological’ conception ofplace, which moves beyond Augé’s self-under-

standing. In fact, it promises to move beyond

Castells’s own still abstractly oppositional sense of

what he nonetheless acknowledges to be a dialec-

tical relation between places and �ows, in whichthe contradictions between their different logics

appear, in his words, as ‘a structural schizophrenia

. . . that threatens to break down communication

channels in society’.17 (It should be noted that the

two sides of this supposed ‘schizophrenia’ are actu-ally mainly distributed between different, hierarchi-

cally related, social groups. In this respect, the

oppositional element in the structure represents a

con�ict of interests and forms of identity, rather

than a split within a single social subject: the emer-gence of a new spatial elite. There is a con�ict here,

not over ‘space’ as such, so much as over spatiali-

sation.) Finally, such a rethinking of Augé in rela-

tion to Castells raises the possibility of giving

analytical substance to what Hardt and Negri haverecently called ‘a new place in the non-place’ or

(better) ‘a new place of the non-place’, which

would be the site of ‘ontologically new determina-

tions of the human’, an alternative (for them,

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republican) global form of non-place opposed tothe non-place of the currently emerging power they

call ‘Empire’.18

It is the prophetic hope of this idea that it will

resolve the contradiction (stoically endured by

Augé, with a certain melancholy) between the factthat, in Augé’s words, ‘never before have individual

histories been so explicitly affected by collective

history, but never before, either, have reference

points for collective identi�cation been so

unstable.’19 Whether or not this might be any more than a prophetic idea depends in large part

upon the relations between place and non-place,

places and �ows; and in particular upon the

constitution of places qua non-places by �ows. This

happens at all levels of place-based spatial organi-sation: from the human body all the way up to

what Hardt and Negri treat as the (politically) ulti-

mate non-place, the planet, or at least the physical

contiguity of its surface layers. (There are other

places to which humans, or their crafts, have trav-elled or might be imagined to travel – other planets

– central to the political imaginaries of the last

century. But they do not as yet bear on the

question of the actual spatial form of political

subjectivisation, which is the issue here.) Mostimportant of all, perhaps, is the mediating level of

global/informational cities, at which we may also

locate the network of the international artworld.

Global/informational cities are ‘spaces of contem-

poreity’, in the literal sense of a coming togetherof times – nodal points of multiple temporalities –

and the prime mediating sites of the dialectic of

places and �ows, the spatial register of interacting

temporal forms.20

4. Art-space as non-placeThe institutional spaces of art are related to the

new global/informational metropolitan non-placesthrough the network character of the international

artworld, but also, more fundamentally, via the deep-

rooted immanence of metropolitan spatial experi-

ence to modern art itself, both in its formal structure

and context of reception. As Brian O’Doherty has put it, with reference to Schwitters’s Merzbau, but

the point holds for modern art more generally:

The city provided the materials, models of

process, and primitive esthetic of juxtaposition

– congruity forced by mixed needs and inten-tions. The city is the indispensible context of

collage and of the gallery space. Modern art

needs the sound of traf�c outside to authen-

ticate it.21

The organising principle of collage is the mythos ofa city; and collage is at the core of a generic (non-

medium-based) modernism. But modern art still

‘needs the sound of traf�c outside to authenticate

it’, to refer it back to this principle, because of the

self-enclosed, self-insulating character of galleryspace. It is in its speci�c character as a self-enclosed

and specialised place that the gallery appears as an

exemplary or ‘pure’ non-place: constituted as a

non-place by its dual negation of place-based social

functions by itinerary and textuality: the itinerary ofthe viewer, the ‘textuality’ of the work – a form of

itinerary that mediates the universality of the work’s

address with the individuality of relations of private

property. In O’Doherty’s words, ‘the empty gallery

. . . [is] modernism’s greatest invention’ because thewhite cube is ‘the single major convention through

which art is passed’:

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of artPeter Osborne

If art has any cultural reference (apart frombeing ‘culture’) surely it is in the de�nition

of our space and time. The �ow of energy

between concepts of space articulated through

the artwork and the space we occupy is one

of the basic and least understood forces inmodernism. Modernism space rede�nes the

observer’s status, tinkers with his [/her] self-

image. Modernism’s conception of space, not

its subject matter, may be what the public

rightly conceives as threatening. Now, ofcourse, [it is 1976] space contains no threats,

has no hierarchies. Its mythologies are drained,

its rhetoric collapsed. It is simply a kind of

undifferentiated potency. This is not a ‘degen-

eration’ of space but the sophisticated conven-tion of an advanced culture which has

cancelled its values in the name of an abstrac-

tion called ‘freedom’. Space now is not just

where things happen; things make space

happen.22

A familiar minimalist insight, you might say. Indeed

it is, and it led rapidly to the transgression of literal

(or ‘empirical’) gallery space, and the proliferation

of ‘site’-based work, since ‘things make space

happen’ and not the other way around. However,and this is my point here, it is naïve to believe that

this transgression of literal or ‘empirical’ gallery

space constitutes a violation of the ontological

character of art-space as instituted by the gallery

and the modern art museum. Rather, the space thatart-things/relations ‘make happen’ remains art-

space, wherever it is, insofar as the contextual ‘art

character’ or function of the things/relations

remains tied up with the (much misunderstood)

notion of ‘autonomy’. In this sense, art-space is self-instituting, once historically established through

what O’Doherty calls ‘the placelessness and time-

lessness’ of the gallery’s ‘hysterical cell’: art turns

space into art-space. Non-place is the spatial dimen-

sion of art’s autonomy, and thus, its continuingmodernity. What keeps this space stable, O’Doherty

argues, is the lack of alternatives. ‘A rich constella-

tion of projects comments on matters of location’,

but they do not so much suggest alternatives

as ‘enlist . . . the gallery space as a unit of estheticdiscourse.’23 My claim is stronger: not only is

gallery-space a unit of aesthetic discourse in post-

minimalist art, it establishes the ontological struc-

ture of art-space which must subsequently be

recreated by the work in each instance whereverit is.

The ‘architecturalisation of art’ is in this respect

also a reduction of architecture to art. The idea that

‘everything is architecture’, in Charles Eames’s

famous words, is a particular in�ection of the ideathat ‘anything can become art’. Indeed, it is this

latter principle viewed from the standpoint of

construction. Taken literally, such architectural

imperialism presages the end of architecture. For

the principle is unstable. ‘Everything’ and ‘anything’quickly become ‘nothing in particular’ and then

‘nothing’. That ‘anything can become art’ marks

the destruction of medium speci�city, convention-

ally associated with neo-Dada and minimalism, but

it is more fundamentally realised in conceptual art, as the condition of possibility of the main trans-

formation in the ontological status of art over the

last three decades: namely, the replacement of

the primacy of the ‘object’ by the installation or

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instantiation of the art idea. Fundamentally, it is not objects that are ‘installed’ here (although they

may be the literal medium), or even works, but art

ideas. Works are the product of the installation.

Installation has been transformed from a technical

to an ontological category. In the process, art isbecoming co-extensive with the material articula-

tion of art-space. This is a process belatedly recog-

nised by the major art institutions and recently

symbolically sealed by the acquisition by the

Museum of Modern Art, New York (cathedral ofpre-conceptual modernism), of PS1 in Brooklyn.

Painting is itself subject to this condition. That is,

just as during the 1960s, the status of painting as

‘an’ art, sui generis, gave way to the requirement

that paintings legitimate themselves directly as ‘art’(‘painters’ had to become ‘artists’, they were no

longer artists simply by virtue of being painters), so

the use of paint to make ‘art’ now increasingly

requires the painting (no longer an ontological cate-

gory) to make a claim on the broader art-space.One can see Schnabel struggling with this, I think,

and it is perhaps the more interesting aspect of

certain 1980s neo-expressionist works by Baselitz

and Kiefer. However, the art-character of the archi-

tecture of contemporary museums supervenes,insistently, on the objects within them. The �rst,

New York Guggenheim, was the forerunner here,

now franchised internationally on the back of the

success of Gehry’s Bilbao building and one can see

a similar process at work in the great turbine hallof the Tate Modern, in London. A peculiar reversal

is occurring: it is now only outside these spaces

(allegedly dedicated to it) that contemporary art can

‘live’ critically on its own terms. This was always

true of the museum as mausoleum, but it isbecoming true of the contemporary art museum

and gallery too. However, and this is my main point,

paradoxically, art can only ‘live’ there, outside the

gallery, by recreating the ontological character of

gallery space (art-space) in various ways, trans�g-uring the social character of the space it occupies.

Contemporary art produces (or fails to produce)

the non-place of art-space as the condition of its

autonomy and hence its functioning as ‘art’. That

is, autonomy is not an external condition of art, butmust be produced anew, on the basis of its external

conditions, in each instance, by each work, by its

immanent negation of place. Art cannot live, qua

art, within the everyday as the everyday. Rather, qua

art, it necessarily interrupts the everyday, fromwithin, on the basis of the fact that it is always both

autonomous and ‘social fact’.24 It is the continued

search for a productive form of this duality that has

driven art beyond the literal physical space of

museum and gallery into other social spaces. It isin this sense that the internal space of the gallery

has become, in O’Doherty’s words, ‘an emptiness

gravid with the content art once had’: a negative

image of the content art still seeks outside the

gallery, compensated by the architectural art-spaceof the gallery itself. Ironically, under these condi-

tions, it is perhaps works of institutional critique

alone that are currently keeping the contemporary

art museum alive as a space for art other than the

architecture of the buildings themselves.

Notes and references1. This is the text of a talk to the conference ‘Returns

of the Avant-Garde: Post-War Movements’, organised

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of artPeter Osborne

by the Centre for Arts Research, Technology and

Education (CARTE) and the School of Architecture,

University of Westminster, 24–25 November 2000. It

draws on materials from a larger project on art as a

cultural form, ‘Art or Aesthetic?’, for which I am

grateful for support from the Arts and Humanities

Research Board of the British Academy.

2. See Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity

and Avant-Garde (Verso, London, 1995), ch. 1.

3. H.D. Harootunian, ‘Ghostly Comparisons’, paper for

the Traces conference ‘The Impacts of Modernities’,

Ewha University, Seoul, 23–24 September 2000;

forthcoming in Traces: A Multilingual Journal of

Cultural Theory and Translation, no.3 (2002).

4. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race,

Class, Nation: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris

Turner (Verso, London and New York, 1991).

5. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London,

Tokyo (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991);

Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information

Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-

Regional Process (Blackwell, Oxford, 1989).

6. See, for example, Rosalyn Deutsche’s Evictions: Art

and Spatial Politics (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1996).

7. See, for example, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected

Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, edited by

Alexander Alberro (MIT Press, Cambridge MA and

London, 1999), Pts III and VI, and Anthony Vidler,

Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in

Modern Culture (MIT Press, Cambridge MA and

London, 2000), Pt II.

8. For example, Jorge Pardo’s current (year 2000)

‘Project’ on the ground �oor of the Dia Centre in

Manhatten; or Richard Wilson’s 1997 modi�cation of

the Serpentine Gallery, London.

9. See, for example, the plans submitted by the �nalists

for New York: Canadian Centre for Architecture

Competition for the Design of Cities, which asked

participants to redesign the area of the West Side of

Manhatten from around Penn Station to the Hudson

River, exhibited at the CCA, Montreal, 15 November

2000 – 15 April 2001. The prize was won by Peter

Eisenman, but the most impressively ‘infrastructural’

submission was the one by Jesse Reiser and Naako

Umemoto.

10. Marc Augé, Non Places: Introduction to an

Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe

(Verso, London, 1995), pp. 28–32, 78–9.

11. Ibid., pp. 77–8, 83, 99, 94, 101, 96.

12 Ibid., pp. 87, 78–9.

13. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy,

Society and Culture. Volume 1. The Rise of the

Network Society (Blackwell, Oxford, 1996), p. 423.

14. Non-Places, op. cit., p. 86.

15. Ibid., p. 87.

16. The Rise of the Network Society, op. cit., pp. 377,

412. See also pp. 410–18.

17. Ibid., p. 428.

18. Michael Herdt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard

University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000),

pp. 216–7, 208, 188–90.

19. Ibid., p. 37.

20. On Castells’s analysis, space is ‘crystallised time’ or

‘the material support of time sharing social practices’.

The Rise of Network Society, op. cit., p. 411. This is

the socially dominant aspect of the space-time

dialectic because it is through time that we are consti-

tuted as �nite – that is, mortal – beings. It is the onto-

logical signi�cance of the constitution of �nitude

through mortality that is the element crucially lacking

from Marx’s materialism.

21. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology

of Gallery Space (1976, 1981, 1986) (University of

California Press, Berkeley, 1999), p. 44. Returning

to this text today one is struck by both its radicalism

and incisiveness – so different from most of today’s

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writings in the purportedly critical, but largely merely

rhetorical, genre of museum studies.

22. Ibid., pp. 38–9.

23. Ibid., pp. 107, 80.

24. See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans.

Robert Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press,

Minneapolis, 1997), pp. 225–9.

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of artPeter Osborne